Harper
Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source (Apache-2.0)
Application type
Platforms
- Self-Hosted
- WebAssembly
- Visual Studio Code
- Mac
- Linux
- Windows
- Homebrew
- Neovim
Features
Properties
- Privacy focused
- Lightweight
Features
- No registration required
- Works Offline
- Ad-free
- No Tracking
- Spell Checking
Harper News & Activities
Recent activities
sserpolar added Harper as alternative to Offline Spell Check for Web Pages
freedailypro added Harper as alternative to FreeDailyPro
reversegpt added Harper as alternative to ReverseGPT
Emir-Is-King added Harper as alternative to AutoCorrect PC
Aashish-Harishchandre added Harper as alternative to Lexicon Writer- chartreuseraven reviewed Harper
The Firefox extension is perplexing. The underlined parts don't match with the errors it's highlighting. It detects smart/angled quotes and apostrophes as errors or different spellings ("it's" vs “it’s” for example, the latter is an error). I will try it on a Chrome-based browser, and if it works as intended there, I will be very disappointed the dev didn't bother with the Firefox version.
- chartreuseraven liked Harper
Harper information
Developed by
Automattic Inc. Licensing
Open Source (Apache-2.0) and Free product.Written in
Alternatives
72 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Categories
Development, Education & ReferenceGitHub repository
- 14,675 Stars
- 576 Forks
- 834 Open Issues
- Updated
Featured in Lists
A list with 75 apps by Anthony2207 without a description.
What is Harper?
Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong. Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round-trip-time of the network request makes revising your work all the more tedious.
LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.
That's why I created Harper: it is the grammar checker that fits my needs. Not only does it take milliseconds to lint a document, take less than 1/50th of LanguageTool's memory footprint, but it is also completely private.
Harper is even small enough to load via WebAssembly.
Comments and Reviews
The Firefox extension is perplexing. The underlined parts don't match with the errors it's highlighting. It detects smart/angled quotes and apostrophes as errors or different spellings ("it's" vs “it’s” for example, the latter is an error). I will try it on a Chrome-based browser, and if it works as intended there, I will be very disappointed the dev didn't bother with the Firefox version.
Biggest "disadvantage" in my opinion: only English.
I had issues with line-breaking on the Paymo website.
Some of the suggestions given by Harper do not match as well as LT so far.
The extension is disabled by default.
Other than that, I like it. It gets the job done, it is open source and I'm confident that it will stay free and open for ever.